Jaisalmer is a beautiful desert city, with a fort in the middle that is very much a living fort.  Within the fort are restaurants, shops, houses, temples and the Fort Palace.  We stayed in a great guesthouse that was within the walls of the fort – it was fantastic to be able to look down from here! When we arrived we had a quick nap to counteract our broken night of sleeping on the sleeper bus before heading out to see the Fort Palace.  The entry tickets came with an audio tour, which we did – it was interesting learning about the different rooms and what they were used for.

We booked an overnight camel tour for the desert for the next day before heading down to the Desert Cultural Centre where we looked around the museum and saw a traditional Rajasthani puppet show.  I was feeling pretty tired that day, but after waking up in the middle of the night with a fever and shaking I realised I was actually sick, and we had to cancel our camel tour. I spent the rest of that day between the bathroom and the bed – extremely disappointed we couldn’t go camel riding and extremely grateful that I wasn’t stuck on a camel while experiencing the worst sickness of our trip thus far! I did manage to drag myself out to see the sunset before collapsing back in bed.  Reuben did an awesome job looking after me, doing lots of runs for antibiotics, water and ORS…so much so that the next day all of the shopkeepers we passed asked me if I was feeling better as they had been talking to Reuben each time he went by!

The next day we explored the Jain temples, pictured above – we could see these from our guesthouse.  They were interesting but we were slightly dismayed to see that the tourist price had gone up from the 30 rupees stated in Lonely Planet to 200 rupees! Considering most of the Hindu temples in India are totally free, this seemed quite steep.  We also weren’t impressed that despite the price increase we were still asked for tips and donations in each temple.    We really loved Jaisalmer and have decided that we want to go back one day to do the camel riding, as we couldn’t reschedule it due to our train booking and travel plans.